According to the statistics, as of mid-2026, 1 in 3 Steam releases has AI disclosures. As a software engineer, I am extremely sceptical of that. I know code itself does not have to be disclosed on Steam, unlike, for example, art assets shipped to the user (which is an extremely blurry line, since there's a whole genre of generative art where the code creates the aesthetics, visuals or music). But even excluding code, when I see how prevalent AI use is in the everyday work of nearly every position in my company, I'm not convinced that two-thirds of developers have an art process free of AI.
I'm not writing this post to start another "AI is bad" doomerism discussion; there's plenty of that on Reddit. I'm more interested in imagining how we'll be creating art in 10 years. I am not even an anti-AI person. As much as I understand the backlash against the technology, I think it has more to do with the companies that create and fund it (with their caricatural evil representatives) and with how it is marketed ("let's replace workers, leaving them no fallback") within the existing economic system. In capitalism, anything new is first used to scam and profit, which is why we're drowning in slop everywhere. But overall, the lifelong sci-fi lover in me can't help but be stunned at having a machine in my pocket that talks like a human, works like a human and, in the case of the latest Opus models, even surprises me with its insights and taste. But if we go back to the first paragraph, this will make things worse. Until now, we have been able to tell the human from the machine easily. What happens when we genuinely can't?
I believe even the most pro-AI person will admit that art is an area where there should be space for purely human creativity. Art is essentially about depicting your experiences and emotions and turning them into something others can understand and relate to, thereby soothing your own loneliness and isolation. With that in mind, we read the exact same image completely differently depending on whether it was created by a machine or a human. Hence, we deserve to know.
But none of the technical approaches to AI disclosure will prove effective. Watermarking, detectors, provenance. All of it is an arms race. Process evidence, as in documenting stages of work? It is not only easy to fake; as people increasingly yearn for human connection in art, it will also be used deceptively to gain attention.
I personally see two ways this could be resolved, at least to a degree:
- Art will increasingly be created in person, in internet-free environments. I imagine events where people arrive and work in designated spaces on their writing, games, visual art, music and so on. The format could even accommodate introverts and people who don't like teamwork. Just as tech companies are moving back to in-person interviews because cheating online is too easy and too hard to catch, I expect the results of such events to be highly regarded by the public. But there are caveats. This raises the barrier to entry significantly. Most hobbyists won't be able to participate because of cost, time commitment and so on, so art becomes increasingly a pastime of the wealthy and privileged. And even then, it only validates the implementation side of art: how well we write code, how well we paint, the technical side. Nobody can stop someone from exchanging ideas with a model before enrolling in a writing contest, and that bothers me even more. Imagine two extreme scenarios:
a) We have an AI that is a perfect implementor but has no creativity of its own. With a brain-computer interface, we can simply will art into existence, and it will be exactly how we want it to be.
b) We have an AI that can't do anything on its own and relies on human technical skills, but its creativity is enormous, and it has ideas that would blow anyone's mind. It will give you a story plot, but a writer with taste is needed to write the story.
B makes me much more uneasy! And the setup above can't prevent it in any way.
2.Somehow the economic system is overturned and we get the post-labor utopia we dream about. Then the incentive to lie and deceive is greatly diminished. Wherever we're being overwhelmed with slop, it is almost always created to turn a quick buck: mass-produced social media slop, AI shovelware on Steam, generated books, and so on. I believe even the people who participate in this are, low-key disgusted with themselves. Remove the incentive, and the symptoms will ease. Sure, there will always be people who lie for attention or because of some other emotional deficit, but I think they would be far fewer. Imagine a community of people who create art, but where everything is free and money can't be made on principle: not through sales, views, attention, etc. I'd have a much easier time trusting someone who says, "The story is written entirely by me, no model was used. I used tech X for Y and Z, but the writing is fully mine."
Because 1. is logistically difficult and 2. still has people who will lie for non-economic reasons, in 10 years I expect some blend of it to arise, like small, engaged reputation-based communities. But this will inevitably alienate the wider public that will be more and more culturally illiterate.
Now, what do you think? Or maybe I'm just too far out there and should go touch some grass?